Weekend reads: Sexism in a medical textbook; proof Reviewer 2 is a jerk; COVID-19 and research misconduct

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• the retraction of a paper that editors called “deeply offensive to particular minorities“
• alarm over self-citation at nearly 50 journals
• the story of why a retraction took nearly two years
• a retraction because editors realized a penis enlargement drug was just homeopathy

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 22.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Just a fat hairy lady.” A “Sexist Description in Surgical Textbook Highlights Bias in Medicine, Physicians Say.”
• “Dear Reviewer 2: Go F’ Yourself.” A study of “Pennywise the Clown, combined with el chupacabra, wrapped in the Blair Witch.”
• “When somebody submits a paper to The Lancet, the first thing I think is not, Do I need to consider research misconduct?” 
• The resignation of Mark Auslander, a Michigan State museum director, in five acts.
• “Professor Vazire was rejecting the papers because she believed they had serious flaws. But the committee that appointed her was worried that in upsetting famous researchers, the journal’s reputation could be put at risk.”
• “Former Harvard researcher who sexually harassed postdoc sparks turmoil at Italian institute.”
• “The fact that scientists are getting work out there earlier so that other scientists can pore over it and we can maybe learn things more quickly — that’s a good thing. The fact that we’re treating it all equally as if it’s all been … subject to the same level of scrutiny — that’s the problem.”
• “We are the editors of a science journal, committed to publishing and disseminating exciting work across the biological sciences. We are 13 scientists. Not one of us is Black.” The editors of Cell say that “science has a racism problem.”
• In psychology, “most publications have been edited by White editors, under which there have been significantly fewer publications that highlight race.”
• Editors at a leading chemistry journal that made an editorial decrying diversity efforts disappear after strong criticism describe their path forward. Still no word on what will happen to this other paper the journal made disappear.
• “New journal will vet Covid-19 preprints, calling out misinformation and highlighting credible research.”
• “One might look to agree uniform definitions of ‘retracted’ and ‘withdrawn’. But in conversation with others who have thought about the problem, I have been persuaded that this can lead to ambiguity and that a simpler way is needed—to use one term only: ‘retracted’ and ‘retraction’. And to withdraw the words ‘withdrawn’ and ‘withdrawal’.”
• A professor and his supporters wonder whether race played a role in his denial of tenure.
• “Notwithstanding the long-term presence of scientific misconduct in Indian science, historical accounts also indicate that India has long been at the leading edge of reform…”
• “By the late 1700s some scientists were already complaining that there were too many journals for anyone to keep up with. The solution turned out to be yet more journals, increasingly dedicated to single disciplines as science became more specialized.”
• The editors of one cancer journal say papers in other cancer journals should be “interpreted with caution.”
• How a much-ballyhooed preprint about COVID-19 strains changed during peer review.
• “Although institutional affiliation is not mandatory in scholarly publishing, a new trend of multiple and simultaneous affiliations, which I will call ‘octopus affiliations’ or ‘octaffiliations’ in short, is increasingly noticeable as a distorted consequence of academic ranking and evaluation systems.”
• How impersonators in mathematics “underscored the consensual social foundations of legitimate participation in a scientific community and the symmetric fictional character of both fraud and integrity in scientific authorship.”
• “The scientific community’s response to COVID-19 has resulted in a large volume of research moving through the publication pipeline at extraordinary speed, with a median time from receipt to acceptance of 6 days for journal articles.” Another study had similar findings.
• “Currently published COVID-19 studies were accepted more quickly and were found to be of lower methodological quality than comparative studies published in the same journal.”
• “Rush to publication – What do we have to lose?”
• “Undisclosed Conflict of Interest is Prevalent in Spine Literature.”
• “As a reviewer, I’m sometimes surprised by the poor quality of some of the pieces that cross my desk.” Tips for writing academic papers.
• “Postpublication peer review is often the best test of a study’s integrity,” says George Lundberg, who was the editor in chief of JAMA for 17 years.
• A new study finds that “peer-reviewed scientific publications receiving more attention in non-scientific media are more likely to be cited than scientific publications receiving less popular media attention.”
• “Retracted publications in dentistry are continually cited positively following their retraction, regardless of their study designs or reasons for retraction.”
• “An NEJM spokesperson also denied that any steps were skipped in the rush to get research out during the pandemic.”
• “[T]his study will be retracted by tomorrow, with a margin of error of probably zero percent.”

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